


This Side of the Line

by HenryMercury



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alcohol, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bad Weather, Drug Use, F/M, Hogwarts Eighth Year, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Rain, Recovery, Self-Medication, Suicide mention, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, unlikely friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-13
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-06-26 20:35:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15670818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HenryMercury/pseuds/HenryMercury
Summary: Why is she in the middle of the quidditch pitch in the rain?





	This Side of the Line

**Author's Note:**

> For prompt H4: 'Why is she in the middle of the quidditch pitch in the rain?'  
> Suggested Character(s)/Pairings: Harry/Pansy  
> Any optional extras: Angsty, and apologies and a happy open ending, and maybe a kiss or two?
> 
> Thanks yet again to my beloved beta H, for braving the typo storm that always blows in about halfway into my drafts.

_You're standing out in the rain tonight / like you've got something to say to god  
You've got a debt to pay back / for something you did way back_

[Mistake - Middle Kids](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRmsyFCP-Jw)

☂

At first Harry thinks it's just a shadow, the black patch in the middle of the quidditch pitch. It's only half four, but on the kind of afternoon that gets dark just after midday. He's high above on his broom, letting the cold rain lash his body until it sobers him. It's a shit idea, flying drunk in the rain and the Scottish cold—obviously it is—but at this point Harry's not sure that matters. He's made stupid choices and they've turned out for the best; he's made sensible choices—choices like returning to Hogwarts after the war—and they've turned out... whatever.

Once his teeth start to chatter so hard he thinks he might break his jaw from clenching it, and once his eyes are streaming from the wind and rain and he can't actually feel his hands gripping the broom handle, Harry descends.

It becomes clear the shadowy shape is not what he expected when he nearly lands on it. Or, more accurately, on _her_.

Pansy bloody Parkinson lies in the middle of the boggy grass, drenched and wheezing strangely.

"What?" she asks, the obvious attempt at petulance spoiled by the weird harmonics Harry thinks he hears in her voice.

"What _what_?" he asks, confused.

"What are you doing?"

Harry is no less confused. "What are _you_ doing?"

"Are you just going to repeat everything I say?"

"No. I just want to know why you're here. Are you... are you alright?"

Parkinson laughs, and it's a sound that could have had its origin in the bellows of a broken accordion. "Do you ever get tired of asking stupid questions, Potter? Of course I'm not alright. Would I be out here if I were? Would _you_?"

"I'm fine," Harry argues. It's automatic at this point. Hearing the words leave his mouth, though, he wishes he could take them back. He's out here because it's the one place he doesn't have to pretend anything at all for anyone. Even back in the Gryffindor boys' dorms he has to keep himself together because he can't expect Ron of all people to deal with him falling apart. It wouldn't be fair; at the end of the day, it's Ron who actually lost a brother. Parkinson doesn't seem to bear the knowledge that Harry's a bit fucked up in the same heavy way Ron would, though. Also, Harry doesn't really care how she feels about it.

"Yeah, _fine_. That completely explains why you look like you just spent several years cutting onions," Parkinson snorts.

Then her hand moves up towards her face and Harry sees a little roll pinched between the thumb and forefinger, yellowish smoke coiling up from the end of it, the rain dancing off a tiny umbrella charm above her hand that makes the rest of her soddenness look especially conspicuous and deliberate.

Parkinson puts the... whatever it is—a joint?—to her lips and takes a drag. Her eyes close, lashed clumped with water, and Harry watches with a sort of detached horror as red slices open up on the sides of her long, pale neck, rivulets of rain leaking into them.

After a few noisy, shuddering breaths, she smirks up at him and rasps: "Want some?"

" _No_."

"Good, I wasn't going to give you any anyway," Parkinson shrugs. "Hard to get a good Gillyweed spliff around here when you've no friends and not much money left."

"Are you suicidal?" Harry asks in a rush. He doesn't personally have any experience with smoking Gilly, but he does know that keeping a tub of water close by is non-negotiable. Vague accounts from Seamus, Gin, Luna and George have led him to picture the process as follows:

  1. Inhale the smoke  
2\. Stick your head in a fishbowl



"What'll you do if I _am_ suicidal, Potter?" Parkinson takes another drag. She squints up at him as the rain gains yet more weight and splashes in her eyes.

It's a pretty good question.

"If you are, I'll get you help," Harry decides. He's not sure what kind of help, but this is Hogwarts; help always comes. He plants his feet in the squashy ground and gives her his best stubborn look. Harry happens to know that his best effort in this category is pretty fucking good.

"If by _get help_ you mean put me in Janus Thickey with Draco then yeah, I'm sure you'd love to do that."

It's not the first Harry's heard about Malfoy since the war's end, but it's the first time he's heard it from someone who might actually know what's happened to him.

"Are any of the reports true?" he asks, cautiously. He's learned to be cautious when asking about Malfoy. Apparently he does it too often, gets too obsessed. He used to think it was a reflection on Malfoy, not on himself, but Harry's started to think otherwise this year, as Malfoy's absence has left him to direct his fascination elsewhere.

"Yes and no," Pansy answers. Her tone is breathy and blithe, but Harry can see the way the spliff bends slightly as extra pressure tightens the hand she's holding it in. "He did what they said he did, but not for the reasons they said he did it. Or mostly not, anyway. Who the fuck knows? They've got him on so many potions he hardly acknowledged me when I visited; I don't know why they bothered to stop him dying if they just planned to turn him inferi."

"Why, then, if not because he wanted to escape trial, or because he was ashamed, or looking for sympathy? Why?"

Malfoy's never been the kind of bloke who's set out to hurt himself. Not without something to gain from it that’s worth the pain. Harry can't imagine him actually edging over that line, committing to the point of actually wanting not to be brought back. Even Harry can't do that anymore. He did it once, in the forest that day, and it didn't last. He can't let himself go only to come back _again_ and have to answer for it.

"He just wanted that _thing_ gone. Gouged too much of himself out with it. That's all."

Harry tries not to picture it. Suddenly, he doesn't want to be talking about this at all.

"What's so good about Gillyweed anyway?" he asks abruptly.

"Smoke it in the rain and it feels like your lungs are on fire. You can feel your blood rushing. Your head goes light. And all of it's on _purpose_. On _my_ terms. It sure beats panic attacks. I don't mean to die though; you and your saviour complex can relax."

 

By the time Harry and Parkinson trudge back up to the castle (together, but separated by a few metres of plausible deniability) he's a bit shocked to realise they’ve just had an entire conversation without even the threat of hexes flying.

He's sobering up, and the stomach ache and dry mouth are setting in, so he skips dinner and makes his way up to Gryffindor tower. He can't get to sleep when no one else is there, but he can lie staring at the ceiling until time stops feeling real.

☂

Draco is institutionalised, and Blaise is in Italy with his mum. Theo Nott is more of a fucking arsehole than ever, and Millie and Daphne are so wrapped up in each other Pansy’s almost annoyed that they did come back; these days, Pansy finds herself either alone or wishing she could be. She finds herself alone at the Slytherin table despite the others who sit and hold their own conversations nearby. She finds herself alone in the girls' dorm while Mills and Daph whisper and giggle and do Merlin knows what to each other as if she's not even there. She finds herself alone in class, when a teacher orders everyone to pair up, and if she doesn't have company during mandated periods of proximity then it's hardly a shock that she has none during her spare time.

Except, apparently, when Potter is around. Pansy thought she understood the boy: Saviour of the fucking world, cocky Quidditch star, and much too good for the rest of them because of something he 'did' as an infant. But then she also thought she understood herself, and the people around her. The past few years have proven time and time again that she was wrong.

 _Wrong wrong wrong_.

Pansy was supposed to grow up and achieve great things. All she's made of herself so far is a human-shaped fucking mistake. She's not the only one, but at least Draco can rightly blame his parents and the Dark Lord for the worst of it. It's absurd that Potter, the person who should be most offended by Pansy's bright little idea during the battle at Hogwarts, is the only one willing to speak to her like she's a person.

After their first encounter on the Quidditch pitch, Potter's found his way to her twice more. It's always when the weather is foul enough to scare most other students back indoors, and there's always a hint of firewhisky smoke on his breath, Gilly smoke (or, if she hasn’t been able to get any, tobacco) on hers.

Today, Potter’s brought the bottle with him. It's a large bottle, though halfway empty already. his silhouette moseys towards her where she sits with her arse in the damp dirt, back leant against one of the goalposts, spine shifting uncomfortably against the stiff pole. He's blackened by the moon behind him, which is bright, just past fullness. It's a clear night, but too late and far too cold for the sane and self-preserving to be beyond their common rooms.

"Parkinson!" Potter yells.

He enunciates about as well as Pansy's father used to when he tripped down the garden path towards the front door of the manor of an evening, bellowing some incomprehensible song. Of course, later on evenings turned to mornings and then afternoons, songs becoming threats and abuse. By the time he stopped coming home at all his slurring was far worse than even Potter's deserves to be likened to right now. She can only hope he’ll stay on this side of the line.

"Potter," she sing-songs in response. She never quite knows how their conversations will go. Whether they'll be all sarcasm or anger or emotionally flat. "You look well."

"For a dead guy," Potter snorts. He reaches Pansy and swings around the next goalpost a few times before falling onto the grass.

"I'd have said you're one of the least dead people in recent history. You're reasonably well-known for _not_ dying."

“Once, yeah. But I died last year. Not my fault I had to come back.”

Pansy honestly can’t tell whether he’s just spouting alcoholic nonsense or whether this is actually a shard of truth. “ _You’re_ not getting suicidal on _me,_ are you now Potter?”

“Harry.”

Pansy just raises her eyebrows.

“Should call me Harry.”

It’s been a _long_ time since Pansy came to terms with the fact that she’d never be on a first-name basis with the famous Harry Potter—but the git is looking at her with that expression that says she can either do as he’s asking and get answers to her other questions, or they can argue about the name thing all night. One night of _Harry_ won’t hurt anyone, she tells herself.

“Fine,” she says. “Harry. You should answer my question.”

“Not going to die. Couldn’t if I tried, so why try?” He gives the lip of the firewhisky bottle a bit of a snog, throat working as he swallows the dark liquid down.

“Not exactly the reassurance I was looking for,” Pansy mutters. “But fine. That gives you time, I suppose. Time to figure your bullshit out—because if one of us is going to, it’s hardly going to be me, or Draco. We’re as good as Death Eaters for this life.”

“You aren’t. Never were,” says Harry. “You were just scared. And mean.”

“I imagine all the other mere mortals around me were soiling their pants as well,” Pansy says dryly. “And yet they managed not to suggest offering you to the Dark Lord on a silver platter.”

Harry snorts in some kind of amusement and takes another swig. Pansy doesn’t ask him to explain his response.

At length, he says, “I’m not mad about that, by the way. I was for a bit, but… not anymore. I don’t hate you for it. Don’t reckon I hate you for anything.”

“A glowing recommendation from the boy hero himself. Are you coming on to me, Harry? Your possible lack of hatred towards me is positively swoon-worthy.”

“I mean it,” Harry frowns. “I forgive you. And I like this,” he gestures sloppily back and forth between them. “Whatever it is. The talking. Me and you.”

“Salazar, you’re a sodding _sentimental_ drunk,” Pansy concludes, fighting down an expression that feels disturbingly akin to fondness. She’ll never be able to liken his sloshed slur to dear old Dad’s again.

“Do you forgive me, too?” he asks, as if _that_ question makes any sense at all.

“What on earth for?”

He grimaces. “The war. ‘smy fault.”

“You can’t genuinely believe that,” she says, although the haunted expression on his face gives her the horrible feeling that he _does_. Merlin save her. “It wasn’t your bloody fault the Lord Wankemort tried to murder you as a fucking baby, and it wasn’t even your fault that you didn’t fucking die. You didn’t _ask_ him to storm the castle, or hurt people, or any of it. Nobody thinks otherwise.”

Abruptly, Pansy is very tired. It’s too goddamn much.

“Stop hogging that bottle, you selfish bastard,” she says, snatching for it, missing, and overbalancing so that she lands with her hand on his knee. She doesn’t even know when they got close enough for it to happen. It’s awkward, but he laughs and doesn’t seem bothered by it. _He’s warm_ , is all Pansy can think. Inebriation has left them out in the bitter air without the ability to maintain a warming charm (they’ve all heard the horror stories of temperature charms gone wrong, and she has zero intention of becoming one, much as _‘she was too hot for this world’_ would make a good obituary). Harry’s like a hot water bottle, and she can’t help but want him right against her side.

Pansy jumps when Harry’s hand lands on top of hers, wide and brown and callused and even warmer than the feeling of his knee through his trousers. He lifts her hand, and for a moment she thinks he’s going to toss it aside, but he simply wedges the bottle into it, his fingers curling over hers in an unnecessary demonstration of how she ought to grip the curved glass. She holds on tight, and after a few long moments he lets go, satisfied that she’s got it. She meets his eyes—in which she reads surprise not dissimilar to her own—and drinks deeply.

☂

The sky is glaring white light and spitting rain on the morning when Pansy almost dies. It’s luck, really, that Harry’s out on the grounds walking off an argument with Neville of all people, and sees her. It had been a restless morning, static crackling through him and trying to go to ground whenever anyone came too close.

Pansy’s sitting on one of the rocks that mar the lawn on the way down to the Black Lake, the telltale trail of Gilly smoke rising above her becoming visible as he approaches. It doesn’t occur to him to avoid her; hanging out with Pansy is itself a way of avoiding people. Their tentative friendship is a place too unexpected to even have a dot on the map that covers every other part of Harry’s life. She’s facing away from him, looking out over the dark, choppy surface of the water. He watches her as he approaches. It’s a habit of his lately; he likes the idea of getting to know who she is when she believes herself to be alone. Ron would tell him he’s being a creep, and Hermione would tell him the same but with a reference list full of psychology textbooks and criminal trial judgments, or something. It doesn’t feel creepy, though. It feels different than it did when he was investigating Malfoy. He can’t get Parkinson off his mind because he—well. He doesn’t suspect her of anything worse than an illicit smoke here and there. He just… notices her. Wants to be noticed by her, too, which is strange when he’d prefer the opposite from virtually everyone else.

He’s halfway down the grassy slope when he sees her stiffen, hunch, clasp at her throat with scrabbling hands. Harry breaks into a run, his heart pounding with the fight-or-flight response that’s plagued him without purpose since the war’s end. It’s exhilarating, in a horrible way, to have an actual reason for feeling that way again. It’s all different when the anxiety is bound to a problem he can solve.

It's obvious what’s happening, from the bright veins in Parkinson’s wide eyes and the fruitless open and close of her lips (glossed over in a pale pink with blue glitter flecks, today). Harry doesn’t hesitate, just hauls her up the way he’s hauled plenty of wounded before, wraps his arm beneath her shoulders and slides her arm over his. He’ll lift her if he has to, he thinks to himself, but she’s doing an alright job of moving towards the lake as he takes some of her weight. The wheezing is unnerving, especially now that they’re so physically close. Out of the corner of his eye, Harry can see the angry red slices in her pale neck. The gills look wind-roughened, desiccated at the edges.

They make it to the water and Parkinson collapses on the bank, dunking her face in the freezing, murky water of the lake without hesitation. Harry keeps her from toppling in altogether, and, feeling helpless again suddenly, takes to stroking her hair, keeping it out of her face and sore, healing gills.

It’s several long minutes before she surfaces, reaching blindly for his arm to pull herself upright.

“Shit,” she rasps, hair dripping down onto her shoulders. The gills are only silver-pink lines on either side of her windpipe now—a telltale sign of a bad trip, but nothing a drop or two of dittany won’t do away with.

Harry’s not really sure what to say, so he just stares at her, catalogues the redness of her eyes and the slight blueness in her lips that isn’t just the sparkle in her makeup.

Parkinson stares back, breathing heavily. It still sounds like it hurts. “Thanks, I suppose,” she mutters at last, then looks away from him as if ashamed to have said it.

“You should see Madam Pomfrey,” says Harry. “She can check you’re really alright, and give you something for the scars.” He gestures at the side of his own neck.

Parkinson rolls her eyes, which looks like it hurts too. “I’m not so bloody vain I’ll give myself up over a few scratches. You won’t tell a fucking _soul_ what just happened, Potter, or hexing your bollocks off will be the last thing I do as they drag me off to Thickey.”

The bite in her voice isn’t unexpected—that’s just how she is. It’s the way she sneers around his surname that needles at him.

“I thought you were calling me Harry now,” he says. “And I won’t force you to do anything. I’ll see if I can order in some dittany from the good Diagon apothecary. Maybe you’ll even get to read a _Prophet_ story about how I’m trying to get rid of my scar, or something.”

Pansy barks out a laugh, and then clutches her throat regretfully.

“Merlin but you’re a weird one.” She pauses. “I’ll pay you back for the potion.”

Harry shrugs. “If that’s what you want,” he says. “It doesn’t bother me though.”

“I won’t have myself any further in debt to you,” Parkinson sniffs.

Harry doesn’t _want_ people to feel like they owe him things—doesn’t want to be held above the rest and treated with uncomfortable reverence any more than he wants to be locked in a cupboard and treated as something lesser.

“There’s only one thing I want,” he says easily.

Parkinson eyes him, still too shaken to mask her apprehension with indifference. “What?”

“I’d like it if I could call you Pansy. Since you’re calling me Harry.”

“I’m rolling my eyes,” Parkinson narrates. Harry’s grateful that she doesn’t actually roll them again. “But fine. I’ll allow it.”

Harry feels like he’s just caught a particularly cagey snitch. He can’t help but grin. “Thanks, Pans.”

“I gave you permission to _use_ my first name,” she drawls. “Not abbreviate it willy-nilly.”

☂

The sky is black with drifting charcoal clouds the night when Harry almost dies again. He looks down at the castle from his new Cleansweep Intergalactic, not trying to carefully to stay out of the dorm windows’ view; everyone’s at the Halloween feast, wrapped inside the warm orange light that spills out of the Great Hall’s windows.

Harry lifts one hand off the broom handle and lifts his flask of firewhisky to his numbing lips. The clouds above have conserved some of the day’s warmth, but there’s a brisk wind blowing them away, and right there on the cusp of winter is never an overly hospitable place.

It’s never been an overly hospitable night for Harry.

He watches as a few students sneak around outside the hall, mostly rolling then lighting up cigarettes or pressing one another against walls, hip to hip and mouth to mouth. He hears a few shouts and banging noises which he attributes to Wheezes products.

Harry thinks of George, running the shop without Fred. Wonders how he goes on, as the remainder of something that’s been broken apart.

Before the war, oddly enough, Harry felt more justified in taking time to be angry and sad like this. Back then, he’d been through things that the people around him hadn’t. Now he just feels like he isn’t doing enough to cope while people who lost siblings and children and parents and partners and friends were still going about their lives all around him, walking evidence of the fact that Harry’s personal angst and the shortcomings it wrought weren’t just the inevitable result of trauma, but a sign that he wasn’t strong enough to handle things that others could.

It didn’t help, knowing that things weren’t actually going to get better unless Harry changed somehow, in ways he hadn’t the understanding or the energy to pull off.

So he took himself and his indignity elsewhere and tried to drink and fly them away yet again.

He remembered, like he always did, what had happened on this same night when he was a baby. The vague memories of flashing lights and cold, poisonous laughter merge now with the ghostly projections of his parents and Sirius and Remus that had accompanied him to the Forbidden Forest during the battle. The soft smiles and bittersweet pride on their faces. He doesn’t know, doesn’t _want_ to know, whether they’d still be proud of him right now.

Harry’s drifting right about the tall, dense mass of dark trees at the edge of the grounds before he realises where he’s going. He shivers as the air seems to grow even colder, and as the wind stirs their leaves the trees begin to whisper to him as if in recognition. The forest smells like moist dirt and wet foliage, and its aura is of both decay and fecundity. It’s a place that guards the line between death and life, Harry’s learned—even more so than any ecosystem of predators and prey. It was here that Voldemort’s shade stole life from unicorns; here that Hagrid brought Aragog so that he could live; hell—while Harry himself died inside it once, he was also brought back to life.

The vegetation thickens quickly; Harry can see between the first few rows of trees, can make out the curls of their gnarled roots as they claim the ground, but from there the little light offered up by the moon is easily smothered. This congregation of trees has always kept secrets well—some darker than others.

He’s drifting between tree branches before he knows what he’s doing. A sharp twig combs roughly through his hair, and another pokes his forehead right beside his scar. It might be the alcohol, but he could swear the branches are moving—some out of his way, others into it. He’s momentarily distracted by the velvety beating of wings and the hoot of an owl—then a set of rapid footsteps crackling over dead leaves.

Harry bats a particularly leafy branch out of his face with the hand still holding his bottle, and freezes.

He’s not really even sure what he sees—or senses, somehow, in the dark ahead of him—but all he can think of is the swoop of a dark cloak, the quick glint of silver masks and red eyes. A vine winds curiously around his ankle, and Harry panics, flailing away from its grasp and urging his broom _out out out_ of the forest, his body too flooded with alcoholic adrenaline to properly pick a path back the way he came.

The branch probably doesn’t come out of nowhere, but it might as well have.

 

It’s Ron and Hermione who find him, having noticed his absence from Gryffindor tower and his other haunts around the castle. He’s still sort of awake, but Hermione waves her wand and murmurs something he can’t make out, and the fear and ache and helplessness all go away.

☂

Harry comes to against a familiar stiff surface. He’s in the hospital wing—in one of the hard beds Madam Pomfrey puts him in when she’s particularly displeased. And when he’s broken bones, but Harry thinks it’s mostly a disciplinary tactic.

His head feels stuffed, and he can’t feel his left arm at all, which is never a great sign. His knees and ankles ache fiercely. Groaning, Harry opens his heavy eyes and then squeezes them shut against the blinding light. It must be about noon.

Something small and hard hits his forehead. He ignores it for a second, trying to convince himself that opening his eyes isn’t worth it right now—but then a second small projectile bounces off the side of his nose and slides smoothly down his cheek to land by his ear.

“Who?” he asks, intending to make the question longer, but finding his throat too dry and raw to. He recognises the sensation as a side-effect of bone-healing potions and curses internally. “Ron?”

Another _thing_ hits his forehead.

“I should hope not,” says Pansy’s voice. “I’d look awful as a redhead. I _could_ rock the short haircut, though, don’t you think?”

She’s trying to sound bored, Harry knows, but there’s a weak thread in her disguise, one that vibrates with concern.

“What are you throwing at me?”

“Bertie Bott’s,” Pansy replies, and then pelts another, which misses his head and clacks against the bedframe instead.

“Can I have one?”

“You’ve got a few already.”

Harry rediscovers his right arm—mercifully functional—and wriggles it up and out of the grip of Pomfrey’s tightly-made bed. He picks up the jelly bean lying by the side of his face and pops it in his mouth, biting into it with a sore jaw.

He wants to spit it out immediately.

Pansy’s laughing at him, sounding so amused that it might actually be worth the sour milk flavour filling his mouth.

“Of course you threw,” Harry pauses to cough, “the bad ones.”

“Only a Gryffindor could be stupid enough to fall for that. Here, I’m going to throw two. One’s salt and vinegar, the other’s… looks like strawberries and cream, though it could also be raw chicken. Let’s see how courageous your lot really are.”

One of the beans hits him on the eyelid, and the other glances off his arm, hitting the floor a second later.

“Guess you’ve got one option,” Pansy commentates. “A one in three chance that you won’t be stuck sucking on shit-flavoured sweets.”

Harry hates to disappoint—and a one in three chance that he’ll get the rotten dairy taste out of his mouth is good enough for him. Besides, he’s never really minded the salt and vinegar flavour. They’re weird, but they’re one of the desirable flavours once you’re getting to the bottom of a box.

He plucks the bean from where it rests in the inner corner of his eye and drops it into his mouth instead.

“Idiot,” Pansy says.

It’s strawberries and cream flavoured.

“Maybe, but it paid off,” he says, feeling a touch smug.

“Perhaps. But,” Harry hears her getting to her feet. He recognises the short, sharp sound of her dragonhide kitten heels against the floor. “That was just good luck. Was it good luck that you didn’t brain yourself while drunk-flying into a tree two nights ago, too?”

The amusement is gone from her voice. It’s been replaced with a hard, level fury that makes Harry want to shrink back into himself.

“Two nights,” Harry repeats. He’s been under for longer, but it’s not exactly reassuring to know he’s been out for more than fifty hours.

“Two fucking nights, yes. Are you sad it wasn’t longer?”

“Of course not! What are you—oh. I didn’t mean to hurt myself, if that’s what you’re asking,” he says carefully. “I was just trying not to think.”

“Well you _obviously_ succeeded.”

Pansy still sounds angry, but a bit less so. Harry counts it as a win. He wrestles his reluctant eyes back open, blinking hard and gritting his teeth against the rush of sharp pain. It takes a few moments to see her clearly, but once he does he’s taken aback by the wanness of her face, the unhappiness written clearly across it.

“Sorry,” he mumbles. “It really was a dumb accident.”

“You _will_ be sorry. Granger, Weasley and I have already tipped your whole firewhisky stash down the drain and ordered the kitchen elves not to provide you with anything more alcoholic than butterbeer.”

Harry’s first instinctual reaction is annoyance—but his second is to conjure a vivid image of Pansy, Ron and Hermione all rummaging through his bags together in Gryffindor tower, grim-faced and bitching about what a git he is. It’s… not something he’d realised he wanted until now.

“What are you smiling at, you twat?” Pansy snaps.

“Oh, nothing,” answers Harry, smiling more. “Also, you’re quitting Gillyweed starting now. Fair’s fair.”

Pansy rolls her eyes, but doesn’t protest.

☂

It’s harder getting sober than Pansy’d thought it would be. She’d known to expect the cravings, the little withdrawal signs that plague her now, especially through the evening and the night. The persistent headaches that no potion can quite take away. The breathless feeling of tension as she breathes in the same anxious half-measures for too long without the release that the smoke and temporary gills offer.

These things make quitting awful, sure—but what’s really hard is not reaching for her rolling papers whenever she gets another vague letter from Narcissa Malfoy, or a backhanded note from her own mother, or a postcard from Blaise. What’s hard is going to the Great Hall for dinner and feeling the sickening tug of a terrible memory she knows will turn into a nightmare. What’s hard is watching Harry surrounded by people who care for him while she deflects the scowls of her own housemates.

When the first of the letters (Narcissa’s) arrives, Pansy goes and steps under a scalding shower, as it’s always comforted her to do. But it’s not comforting any more. Not when the enveloping heat of the water makes her itch to feel it in her throat and lungs as well.

Being outside is easier. She finds new spots to sit around the grounds—places she never went to smoke. She sits in the stands overlooking the Quidditch pitch while the teams train, knowing that she can’t light up there without being seen. She buys liquorice wands and chews on them when she needs something to distract her hands and mouth.

Every day is suddenly very, very long. Not in the timeless way that Gilly brought about, where Pansy felt as if she’d stepped a few paces back from the world, back even from herself. No, this is the opposite—the hyperawareness of milliseconds that comes with pain or insomnia. Every second is a trial, and it all reminds Pansy of just how strong she’s not. Just how unlikely she is to overcome.

Harry, on the other hand, was literally born to overcome. Pansy’s not proud of it, but she avoids him because of this. Pansy’s Slytherin through and through—not built for walling her vices out with sheer willpower so much as harnessing them to her advantage. Harry Potter’s the immovable object that stops the formerly unstoppable force. She doesn’t expect him to understand what she’s going through, and she doesn’t want it rubbed in her face.

Pansy refrains from going out on rainy days, but it’s been a wet spell and so she’s mostly been stuck in the common room. She turns her back to the transparent wall and all the lake creatures behind it. When she wants too much to rob a potions storeroom for a chewable quantity of Gilly and join them in the depths of the lake, she goes to the library instead.

It’s in the library that Granger finds her, between their shared Potions class and the Divination class Pansy’s taking just because the only other people in it are Luna Lovegood, who’s been inexplicably serene about Pansy’s presence, and the Brown-Patil pair who are too wrapped up in one another (and too focused on Professor Firenze) to bother with much more than a few dirty looks her way.

“Are you busy?” Granger asks, approaching without hesitation. As if she and Pansy have always been chums, and never made one another’s lives hell at all.

Pansy isn’t busy—she’s staring at the book in front of her with so little focus she can’t quite remember what book it even is.

“Depends,” she answers, warily. A couple of days allied in fear for Harry’s health isn’t enough to make _her_ forget where they stand.

Granger plants herself in the seat next to Pansy. Her eyes roam over the stack of books Pansy’s gathered in an effort to finish the Transfig paper that’s due tomorrow. She doubts she’ll manage. She doubts it will matter terribly if she does, fair as McGonagall claims she’s trying to be. Pansy has no plans of begging for the extra time the Headmistress has said she’ll offer students if the new school mind-healers certify that their mental health statuses and learning capacities require it. The day she sets foot in one of the shrinks’ offices is the day flobberworms fly.

“It’s Harry,” Granger says shortly. “Why are you avoiding him?”

“I’m focusing on my sobriety. It’s not as easy for us mere mortals as it is for the Golden bloody Trio.”

“Well for heaven’s sake don’t tell him you think that,” Granger frowns at her. “If you even do. I didn’t think you were _completely_ daft, Parkinson.”

Pansy just raises her eyebrows at that, not sure what to make of it.

“These two are duds, by the way,” Granger pulls two books out of Pansy’s pile and sets them aside with an unceremonious _thump_. “ _Transfiguration and Transmutation_ is pretty much the _Witch Weekly_ gossip section of the Transfiguration textbook world, and that edition of Leahy has been superseded by a paper Headmistress McGonagall herself published. I’ve been telling Madam Pince to take it off the shelves… ah, yes, here it is. Turpin and Tan give the best explanation. This is the book you want to focus on.”

Pansy isn’t sure whether to thank Granger for her help, or to try and reject it. Neither urge overcomes her, and so she remains silent, brows still cocked.

“You should borrow this,” Granger holds the hefty tome out to Pansy. “And you can use my notes if you’ll come and talk to Harry right now. Please.”

Pansy knows then that she’s not going to refuse. Maybe she knew it before. If something up with Harry, she wants to know—and she suspects that if Granger’s offering to share her homework with Pansy of all people, then something _is_. Pansy can’t refuse if that’s the case; through some dreadful twist of fate, she’s gone and gotten attached to him.

“And have McGonagall fail me for stealing your work? I hardly think so.”

“I’ll tell her we worked together on our research,” Granger offers, setting her jaw and narrowing her eyes in a way that lets Pansy know the Gryffindor won’t be persuaded. “She’ll tell us she’s pleased we’re making the effort to establish inter-house cooperation, but in future we should keep it from becoming close collaboration on academic tasks. Anyway, the essay’s only worth five per cent.”

Pansy gapes. “When did you find that out?” she starts packing her writing implements back into her satchel. She leaves the books where they are. Why bother suffering it at all if it’s virtually insignificant?

From the conflicted look on Granger’s face, Pansy concludes that she’s somewhat disappointed in her readiness to dismiss academic pursuits, even if she’s ultimately pleased to be getting her way. Merlin, but if things were different Draco and Granger could have got along, the swots.

“Okay. Come with me,” Granger commands. Resigned, Pansy follows.

 

 

“Well, you look like shit,” Pansy says when Harry steps out through the portrait hole that is the door to the Gryffindor common room, urged on by Weasley, who climbs out behind him.

“Feel like it too,” Harry groans, pushing sweaty hair back off his forehead.

Pansy notes, not for the first time, the way that famous scar shines in jagged, raised lines, so pale against the warm brown of Harry’s skin, the darkness of his hair, brows, lashes. Even his lips are brown, fading to a warm pink on the inner edge. If Pansy looks at the scar for too long, she starts to get the shivers at just how cruel and foreign the thing is, given what it signifies. The feeling isn’t totally unlike the deeply unsettling sight of seething black scales embedded in Draco’s eggshell white wrist. The two marks have the same source, after all.

“That’s his own fault,” Granger informs Pansy curtly, though she looks at Harry as she says it.

Harry looks away.

“Went through most of a bottle last night,” Weasley fills in. “I’m not saying he doesn’t have good enough reasons or anything, but I know he didn’t _want_ to have done it. He’d have taken Seamus up on one of his hangover potions if he didn’t want to punish himself for it.”

Pansy looks at Harry, at how unkempt and uncomfortable he looks, and the world shifts beneath her. “Oh,” she says.

“Yes. Oh.” Pansy doesn’t like Granger’s _told-you-so_ tone, but she takes a breath and decides not to push her luck.

“I can hex you if you think the negative reinforcement will help,” Pansy offers, stepping closer to Harry. He looks up at her, and she sees the sadness in his eyes, deeper than ever.

“Already offered, mate,” Weasley supplies. It takes Pansy a moment of confusion to realise that, in this scenario, _she_ is ‘mate’. “But I think it’d just help him wallow. We need to pull him out, instead.”

“I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have to do that. I can… do it myself.”

“Where have I heard that one before, Ron?” Hermione asks.

Ron smirks. “Easier to say when he’s _not_ tried to talk us out of helping, Hermione.”

Pansy can’t help but laugh as they continue their little performance. Harry hangs his head—but she can see the tiny smile that creeps onto his face. It’s similar to one she’s seen when it’s just been the two of them. A smile he gives his friends.

“Let’s get some fresh air,” Pansy decides. “Being cooped up in this tower can’t be helping with the nausea.”

“Don’t talk about nausea,” Harry groans.

He looks so green about the (metaphorical) gills that Pansy takes pity. She wraps an arm around his shoulders while Weasley takes the other side, and together they help Harry down the winding staircase.

It’s terrible, really, of Pansy to be glad that Harry’s relapsed like this. She’s not pleased that he’s struggling and suffering—but it’s nice not to be the only one. It shows her what she ought to have known since their first encounter on the Quidditch pitch in the rain: no matter how different they are, what they’re going through really is similar.  

☂

“I really wish Remus was here. I know he could help me with this. Or Sirius, or my mum and dad.”

It’s dreadfully windy outside—terrible weather for things like flying, or walking around without having your hair and robes completely ruined—so they’ve retreated to the library. They’ve claimed a spot behind shelves stacked with books written in ancient languages, blanketed by years of undisturbed dust that proves even Pince doesn’t really bother with sections this obscure.

Pansy drapes the cashmere throw she nabbed from her dorm further over Harry’s crossed legs. She doesn’t know how to comfort Harry when he’s being maudlin about all the people he’s lost; it isn’t like she can make him un-lose them, nor can she tell him not to love the people that he loves.

“Remus as in Professor Lupin?” she asks instead, because the identities of Harry’s parents are straightforward, and there haven’t been many people named Sirius about in recent generations, but _Remus_ could be someone else. She doesn’t know whether Harry was close enough to their old DADA teacher for it to be him.

“Yeah,” he confirms. “He’d have been the best for this, I think. He had so much practice with staying in control, and he always had the patience to teach me how to look after myself.”

Pansy’s surprised by how much the words hurt to hear. She wasn’t kind to the professor back in third year, and wouldn’t have been kind to him after that if circumstances had allowed it. She’d been afraid of him, after all. Or, more accurately, afraid of what his kind could be. But Harry talks about him with an admiration that _aches._

“He was a good teacher,” she says, needing an outlet for the feelings this is giving her. With no chance at a spliff to take the edge off, they’re unbearable.

“The best. He’d always have put things in perspective. Find something productive to do, he’d say. Keep yourself busy learning something new, and when you’ve done it the accomplishment will feel good…”

“That’s not the worst advice.”

“It’s almost exactly what Hermione told me,” Harry laughs roughly. “But she suggested I let her teach me about Ancient Runes. I think that would just drive me to drink even more.”

Pansy lets her head fall back against the brick wall behind her. The cushioning charm doesn’t reach quite high enough to prevent the little burst of impact. She looks sideways at Harry and says, “I’m taking Ancient Runes, and I can confirm that it would. Those classes were far more interesting high, let me tell you.”

Harry’s face scrunches in a sympathetic _yikes_ sort of expression.

“What would Lupin tell you to do, since he seems to have taught you well enough to anticipate his advice?”

Harry picks at a loose thread on the throw, and Pansy resists the urge to grab at his hands to make him stop fidgeting.

“I can’t anticipate all of it,” he sighs. “But maybe he’d say to learn to make something that I like. To work towards an end product that I know I find value in, even if I can’t say whether I enjoy the process behind it.”

“Mm,” Pansy hums in agreement.

The wind’s picking up even further and on top of the ghostly howl it’s been making, now enough cold air is leaking in through a gap in the window frame to make her shiver. She huddles closer to Harry. He lets her, and she marvels at that the same way she does every time he doesn’t reject her company. Instead, he uncrosses his long legs and brings his knees up so that he can move even closer, spreading the throw more fully over both of them.

“I’d like to know how to make a bigger blanket right about now,” he jokes, then pauses thoughtfully. “Maybe I should learn to knit. I know Ron’s mum would be thrilled to teach me.”

“She’s not at Hogwarts, though,” Pansy points out. “You know, Mother made me learn embroidery, if it’s needlework you’re interested in.”

Harry shakes his head, thank Merlin. It’d be funny seeing him try to stitch out some insipid floral pattern, but Pansy never liked doing it, and it’d probably drive her mad if he persisted beyond the point of the hilarity wearing off.

“What about writing. Everyone would drool over an autobiography of the Boy Who Lived.”

Harry’s face says it all. Pansy stifles a laugh in the sleeve of her robe and files the idea for future teasing.

“I’ve always wanted to make my own treacle tarts.”

“If you start baking, my diet will be _ruined_. I’ll have to toss all my clothes and Mother won’t buy me any nice replacements, and I’ll be miserable. Do you _want_ to make me miserable?”

Harry smirks. “What if I promised you a new wardrobe. Would that solve the problem?”

“Technically.”

“Good. Is there anything you want to learn to cook?”

Pansy thinks about it. “Not really, but I’ve always liked the idea of decorating cakes.”

☂

It’s gloomy and wet again, and they sit out in the Quidditch stands watching a handful of tireless first-years practising with a quaffle. A few of them are decent, Harry thinks; possible recruits for the house teams next year. All of them look very small, though. He can hardly believe the things he was allowed to do at the age of eleven.

Pansy vanishes the crumbs and edible glitter which remain of their endeavour in the kitchen, and then she turns her wand upwards to cast an umbrella charm as the drops grow heavier and more frequent. For some reason the icy water trickling down the back of Harry’s neck and plastering his hair to his skull isn’t as easily ignored when he’s trying to have a pleasant afternoon. He huddles closer to Pansy so that the charm covers him fully.

“It’s a pain you’re sober, Potter,” she murmurs lightly, “because I’m freezing my tits off and a flask of firewhisky would go a long way to remedying that right now.”

Harry snorts. Somewhere over the past couple of weeks the tension broke, and it became okay for them to joke about things. Harry had worried that mentioning Gilly would only put it back on Pansy’s mind—but he ought to have known from his own experience that it was always there in one form or another. Acknowledging it, laughing at it, was just a far better form of release than stockpiling and eventual relapse.

“You could try wearing more than a summer-weight cloak out,” he suggests. Pansy’s outfits are always stylish, and she always looks brilliant in them, but practical they are not. “Want my scarf?”

He starts to unwind it, grinning when the protests come.

“That red and yellow monstrosity?” Pansy squawks indignantly. “I wouldn’t be caught dead. Get it off!”

Harry winds it around her neck all the same, not missing the way she shrugs her shoulders so that she can bury the lower half of her face in its wool.

“It suits you,” he says smugly.

“Fuck off.”

She leans her head sideways so it rests on his shoulder, and Harry takes the opportunity to wind an arm around her waist. Pansy claims he’s always unnaturally warm—and if being her personal human heater means he’s smiled at the way she smiled at him while casting the charms the kitchen elves had taught her in his direction, covering him in edible glitter, then he thinks it might be the best thing he could possibly be.

There are a couple of flecks of glitter stuck to her pink balmy lips, shining green and silver amidst the surrounding dullness of the day. Harry’s had his doubts about the quantity of glitter on the tart by the time Pansy was done with it, but neither of them are dead yet, so he figures it’s probably fine. A harmless sort of vice to acquire—which is just as well, because the urge to shift and press his lips against Pansy’s is one he can no longer ignore.

She makes a little surprised noise, then bites his lip and takes over, transitioning the chaste kiss into a proper snog with a decision-making speed that belies her surprise. Her mouth is sweet and hot like a treacle tart straight out of the oven, and the way she laughs at him when she breaks away and he chases her mouth forward is warm and solid and entirely present in the moment.

“Want to go inside?” she asks, tipping the top of her head in the direction of the quidditch kids, who are starting to stare. Harry doubts they even know who they’re looking down at—he certainly wouldn’t have expected to find Harry Potter making out with Pansy Parkinson on the Hogwarts grounds. At the start of term, he’d likely have rationalised away such a sight himself.

He grins. “Yeah. Gryffindor tower?”

“Not a chance. Slytherin common room.”

Harry gives an exaggerated shudder at the thought of the cold, damp stone of the dungeons. “Room of requirement?”

“You know that place gives me the creeps,” Pansy rolls her eyes. They stumbled in one morning only to find an empty but popcorn-scented Muggle cinema playing a cheesy rom-com, and she hasn’t yet been able to forgive the room for it.

“Library.”

“It’ll do.”

The library is a middle ground they can usually both agree on. They stop by the kitchens to pick up hot chocolate, jam and a loaf’s worth of toast, which Harry casts a careful glamour on, only lifting it when they find their usual, neglected corner.

There isn’t dust on the books anymore, though it’s not because anyone’s decided to borrow them. Harry spend an afternoon casting careful cleaning spells over the stacked shelves after Pansy had broken out in a fit of sneezes. They don’t have to prop uncomfortably against the wall now either; Harry had shown up one evening after dinner to find that Pansy had done a small decorating job, complete with blankets and cushions large enough to curl up on. They haven’t exactly talked about what’s between them yet, but it’s clear to Harry that it’s not in the explicit confessions that affection—perhaps even love—really resides.

Pansy levitates the tray with their food in front of them as they settle into their little nest. They’ve had notice-me-not and muffling spells in place since the first afternoon they spent here, so there’s little danger of Madam Pince hearing the crunch of Harry’s jeans against the cushions, or the brazen sound of Pansy’s voice when she tells him to sit still for fucking once in his life or he’ll make her spill her drink.

Harry takes another moment to get comfortable, but once he finds the ideal position he doubts he’ll ever want to move from it. The hot chocolate is thick and bittersweet on his tongue, and Pansy’s chest rises and falls silently as she finishes eating and lies across his lap for a customary nap.

There’s a little window across the aisle, too high up for Harry to see anything through it but the sky, but even that small portal to the outside world is enough to make him feel like he can breathe. He watches the heavy black clouds start to lighten, letting through a watery hint of sunset gold. The driving rain’s not forever, it turns out. It could start snowing any day now.

☂

_You're standing out in the rain tonight / like you've got something to say to god  
He’s got a debt to pay back / for something he did way back_


End file.
